Sunday, October 02, 2005

I guess I should write a letter to the NY Times...




"For the Anti-Evolutionists, Hope in High Places" the article says...

EXCEPT for the robes and the fact that each is addressed as "His Holiness," it would be hard to find much in common between Pope Benedict XVI and Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. Yet both have recently expressed an unhappiness with evolutionary science that would be a comfort to the Pennsylvania school board now in a court fight over its requirement that the hypothesis of a creator be part of the science curriculum...

Neither of these men believes that a religious text, whether the Bible or the Diamond Sutra, should be given a strictly literal reading. Yet they share with evangelicals an aversion to the notion that life emerged blindly, without supernatural guidance. Particularly offensive to them is the theory, part of the biological mainstream, that the engine of evolution is random mutation...



Sigh..."Randomness to a scientist is inherently phenomenological and says nothing about metaphysics; any other interpretation of 'random' simply cannot be expressed in mathematical or scientific terms" I keep saying over and over and over, and other scientists and engineers and mathematicians say the same thing and yet the NY Times persists in making this distinction...which of course would mean that

In a new book, "The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality," the Dalai Lama laments what he calls "radical scientific materialism," warning that seeing people as "the products of pure chance in the random combination of genes" is an invitation to nihilism and spiritual poverty. "The view that all aspects of reality can be reduced to matter and its various particles is, to my mind, as much a metaphysical position as the view that an organizing intelligence created and controls reality." Both, he suggests, are legitimate interpretations of science.


is quite in line with what evolution already implies...and

[C]ompare his words to those of the Discovery Institute in its call for the overthrow of scientific materialism - "the simplistic philosophy or world view that claims that all of reality can be reduced to, or derived from, matter and energy alone." The institute says it hopes "to reverse the stifling dominance" of this perspective and replace it with a "science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."


this marginlizes that the "Discovery" "Institute" "theory" of "Intelligent" "Design" claims to be able to do this reversal from scientific perspective- which, for reasons already stated, it cannot.


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